Why blog? (The unintentional and ongoing hiatus)

Why blog? This is a question I've asked myself recently whenever I guiltily remember that I still have one.

It's certainly not for fame or even the paltriest amounts of money—unless you're lucky and you somehow strike a chord with the public. You write about celebrities or celebrity neckties or the minutiae of parenting or... whatever I'm basically not interested in reading or writing about.

The great thing about having a blog is that it provides an instant forum.Whether anyone else cares about it or not, you can translate a thought into a short essay in a few moments' time and send it out to the Internet universe. There is still something powerful and mystifying and exciting about that for me.

But I, obviously, haven't taken advantage of that lately. I've been busy with multiple part-time jobs—not so busy that I don't have a few moments at the end of the day to collect my thoughts, but busy enough that there is not much to collect at day's end.

I understand now why middle-aged people seemed so boring to me when I was younger. There is a certain worn-out/worn-down quality to this time in life that I haven't entirely escaped. When I was in college, I thought I would always ponder poetry, wonder about the meaning of life in all its quotidian fragments. But, instead, these days I seem to ponder how I will pay the next credit card bill, how many more emails I need to answer, all the things I need to do that never seem to get completely done.

Busy-busy-busy and boring-boring-boring.

So, what we have here instead is blank space—more than five weeks of it. I don't think the Internet universe has missed me. Yet I have missed whatever this is—this silent listening, this momentary audience.